Steam Marketplace and Authenticator: The End of Fast Steambucks

In the past, I had written a little about the decline of the Steam Sale as related (at least in part) to the availability of 'free money' (more of a working discount system) via the Steam Marketplace, where users of the service could sell digital tchotchkes for pennies or dollars (as market forces would dictate). Very low-priced games stopped appearing in sales, prizes stopped appearing, and discounts became pretty shallow, predictable, and unexciting. The high point of the 2011 Christmas Sale would never again be seen, and the blame is mostly on predatory users that couldn't leave a nice thing alone without trying to break it. This attitude, unsurprisingly, caused a lot of problems in the marketplace. Time passed. Inundated with security breaches, lost accounts, trading skullduggery, and service tickets, Valve decided to make their product's product marketplace more secure. Ok...

But it's so god damn annoying. Let me explain. I'll do my best. In the old days of Steam Marketplace, you logged into the service, checked your inventory, and listed an item at a value you set, and it was instantly put up for trade. If your price was a bit lower than the average asking price a bot would buy it almost as soon as you listed it, you would have your 6 cents or 15 cents or 10 dollars. You could trade immediately and use the money immediately - good for making quick money for a sale item when you didn't want to use your credit card. It was pretty simple. It worked. And I made almost a dozen dollars from it, which I used to buy several games, and I liked it. I didn't use it often, but every now and then I checked into the marketplace, and if I saw a good margin on an item I would sell it, and during sales I would buy a cheap game, get the cards, and make a tidy 1 cent profit or whatever, and realized that it didn't matter much. Basically the scheme worked because the gains made from trading went into your Steam Wallet as actual currency. I like to call it Steambucks.  [ I have used Steam for nearly 12 years and I have never put actual money into my Steam Wallet, because that's so insane that I can't understand why someone would do it. It's essentially a feature to give money to your kids, because no other sane person would take real money and let it sit on Steam. The crux of this problem is because accounts with Fat Steam Wallets were getting ganked like crazy. ]

As anybody who has even a remote understanding of the internet will understand: this simple and effective system turned into a huge problem and led to many unfortunate people getting ripped off and targeted by scammers and the whole fucking thing became such a nightmare for Valve that they introduced a phone app and multiple layers of security so that people would stop bothering them and stop (Valve hoped) being so goddamn stupid. Well that was all fine and good. You could use the mobile app or not, and trading went on as usual for a while.

The whole thing came to a head earlier this week? Last week? I don't trade much, but sometime in the last two months it became essentially mandatory to use the Steam Mobile App to authenticate the trade or else suffer a 15 day hold on any item you list. Plus you get boned if you delist an item (which you want to do if the market surges or collapses in order to get your value for it) by having your trading account frozen. All of this is because of hacked accounts and all of those are because people with little to no knowledge of the internet, computing, and basic online security got phished, scammed, and hacked and lost all their precious internet shit. Oh, and people who complained about legitimate trades and demanded returns. So much for the marketplace, and therefore Steambucks. I get it, Valve, but I want to belong to a different tier of uses: the ones who don't fuck up and who never gave you a problem, who didn't expect the world, and just wanted things to stay mostly the same.

The whole thing is dumb anyway, and it's more of an annoyance than anything, but the userbase has been up in arms about it. Pro and contra camps have created a 2000 page thread in the Steam discussions forums that is filled with seething rage and skunk-like defensiveness. Smells like millennial spirit. It's true that downloading one free app is a not a vast and cruel cost, in order to have normal access to your free money. It's true that Valve HAD to do something to protect the credulous and simpleminded and give pause to the over complaining elements of their userbase. Steam users got the solution they deserved. It still rankles me a bit.

I hate apps, and I hate having to register for additional services on top of a service that used to work. I hate having to verify a million things through email, too – it's not just apps. I also hate having to jump through hoops, and I hate when a simple and effective thing that works gets screwed up by people who are predatory and the people who always fall for shenanigans. I hate 'security features' because I keep my computing simple and anonymous for a reason - to be unnoticed, to go unmolested, and to not be bothered or have to bother anyone else. Simple. Never got hacked. I hated two factor security when Blizzard did it for their notoriously noobish, unworldly, immature, and credulous WoW userbase (the cutesy security video forced on everyone as the security features spilled over brought me to the realization that the company I had grown up with had been functionally dead for a while) and seeing Steam go the same way is just depressing. And so very, very annoying, and so very rigidly authoritarian.

Therefore, being forced to wait two weeks to sell an item I used to sell just as safely in two seconds, on a service where I've never caused problems or suffered them, is kind of a kick in the teeth. I used Steam for 12 years and never got hijacked. I never used the Steam Wallet because any sane and reasonable person saw that keeping 'real' money in it was a bad idea and did nothing to make purchases easier or safer. Now the whole thing is getting so complex that even I, a most casual and disengaged user, am actually slightly worried. I mean I knew that Valve could legally shut down and completely deny me any access to the products I've bought through Steam, but I never thought they'd become the type of company that would even think about the possibility. In a sense all these restrictions and half-steps and annoyances are a sign that Valve is being serious and trying its best, but I don't know. It doesn't put my mind at ease either. So I guess I'm selling everything in two weeks, taking the money, and forgetting that Steambucks were ever a thing. Goodbye to an OK era.

Well, Valve is allowed to protect itself from legal action and the Steambucks belonged to them from the start, so it's their call. It's just very disappointing to see it happen like this. Every company is trying so hard to get my phone number or sell me extra apps these days, and I sit here waiting until the day Facebook defriends me for not giving it up (or Google, etc) but Valve is my videogame dealer, and I thought we had an understanding that this was a no-phone arrangement, casual but secure, and that was the strength of it. The internet ruins all things, yea, even itself, and that is known and has been known...

... but still. Damn. Shaking my damn head... it seems there is nowhere to hide, and that indifference is the only thing separating me from insanity. But it seems even I am not immune to writing about the thing and responding to it. It's just another case of dumb people getting fucked by bad people, with the majority caught in the middle wondering sadly why these things never change, why you can't protect the digital dumbasses from the hard knocks everyone has to take. The whole thing is stupid, and it's stupid of me to step into it, but the annoyance and disgust need a way out. Thank you for reading, and good luck.

Advertiser's Bowl: 2013 Edition ft. Existential Ennui

I don't have anything against the Super Bowl. It's a good reason to drink and eat too much and a great excuse for feeling like shit on Monday. What always puzzles me about it is how the Super Bowl Ad has become this huge event. Over the next week there will be Superbowl Ad Top 10s, reviews, and news segments. Most media output about the Super Bowl Ads will have the self-awareness of a gnat. I haven't been paying enough attention to say anything with certainty, but I think it's not really a high mark for society if the high-priced overpowering sports event of the year gets spectators who care more about the high-priced commercials and overpowering half time show. Ravens fans get to feel good, but then again: Baltimore's still going to have its problems, as will we all.

Each year, lately, people get psyched up for the Super Bowl's pricey, overblown, ridiculous commercials. Newscasts neglect problematic, boring stories for the innocent pleasures of the advertisement adventure. Meanwhile grown men have been sacrificing their bodies for... shit tons of money and a good start at fame. The themes seem to run together. There are always some 'innovative' ads, in the loosest sense of the word, but getting excited about innovative advertisement is like getting excited about a new model of taser. It's like getting excited about being in pro sports, but realizing that you may go to shit in the process: we should be so lucky to waste ourselves for such a prize.

For all their expense, commercials are generally devoid of value, promote unhealthy ideas, reinforce stereotypes, lie, cheat, flatter (in the basest sense) and bully the populace. Innovation? Most don't even have the good grace to be entertaining. This year Dodge released a high-quality, high-concept pro-farmer commercial so exceptionalist and baldly desperate that it almost touched the heart – but then again: Dodge is only another part of the dust bowl. What do farmers even matter when the whole proceedings only preach dust bowls?

In spite of all that craziness, I think by far the worst Super Bowl memory I have isn't an advertisement or the spectacular failure of a deserving team. No, my personal darkest moment is when Undercover Boss premiered after Super Bowl XLIV. It was stunning. What a brilliant PR move, but how absolutely disgusting to see something like that and then the uncritical, even positive response. This evil show was embraced. People were and still are enthusiastic about it. Advertainment, another slick evasion of issues such as predatory zero-sum business practices, income inequality, and the Recession. The smug laughter that inevitably results.

I think it's the kind of show that is okay to hate. I don't use the term evil lightly. Evil is a shared burden and all that, but it is okay to despise this goddamn show. It's  toxic, terrible, manipulative and the lack of popular critical response is a sad fact. It showed that soft power knew no bounds: it could take criminals, crooks, bullies and turn them into angelic, benevolent, personable superiors. I have no doubt the executive class is generally not evil, but their culture is not a healthy or positive one. I'm not an idealist to the point where I will deny the fundamental importance of business or industry, but the mere plight of the average modern person unsettles me. The way the earth – life – is used has gone far beyond the point where we can be unthinking and proud about it.

I don't get how such a transparently biased, exploitative show can still be on the air two years later. It is readily apparent that nobody has learned anything in the meantime, and that executives are just as wealthy and powerful as ever, what with the labor market wheezing and slumping like a dying hobo while the screaming middle class sinks. All you have to do to mask the dark side of capitalism is: videotape your choice of 'boss' talking about or doing awkward unsatisfactory work, in a sanitized and tightly scripted environment, edit to taste, pick some compelling underprivileged or overworked employees, wrap it up with a heartwarming situation, some cash prizes, and a teachable moment or two. Because the bosses do care: and no drudge's futile trudge through wage-slavery goes unnoticed and unrewarded.

Like any commercial, Undercover Boss delivers bias and sells misinformation. It meets minimum thresholds for propaganda. It portrays one point of view faithfully, and damn the rest – like the Simpsons, and many other fictional television shows. For instance: I joked some years ago about the five thousand dollar suit. Oh, hell. This is likely show money, which the boss gets to give out in order to humanize them (via #rotecharity). Sometimes an additional prize of changed terms of employment are entered into the bargain. Then tears. Let me tell you something about pathos: dollars alone don't make it convincing. The bosses cry crocodile tears, and the employees cry about the smug charity that will hopefully better their lives by some obscure fraction. 

I tell you of such scenes, not because I follow the show religiously but because I earnestly believe that that sort of indoctrinating pablum should be reserved for what are explicitly aired as advertisements. Undercover Boss contains enough slick reality-TV features to pass as a show, but that's a mask for what is really an advertisement for the same broad attitudes which have time and time again put the majority in the corner and the minority in comfort. At the end of each episode money changes hands, and nothing significant changes. The landscape of exploitation remains the same, and objecting to it still results in a defensive reaction from the world's largest, wealthiest, most powerful guilty party.

We keep worshiping opulence, and when it inevitably fails and bankrupts us, we find that consumerism is a sweetened abyss anyway. Everyone is sick with it. The rational mind knows* it is madness to overproduce, to hoard, and to waste – nevertheless: it's a race to the bottom and nobody can afford to miss out. There is only one way down.

(*or ought to, if it is at all thoughtful)

Harmless News Story or Intentionally Downplayed Opportunity for Ethical Boycott?

A story I happened to read today developed serious undertones of 'Age of Indifference' malaise in less than five minutes. The first embarrassing part of the story is that, while the article is posted in the 'Diversions 'n Oddities' section, it's a story about drug catapults on the Arizona-Mexico border. This has to be some kind of lesson in provincialism in news reporting, right? This is better than indifference. This is global indifference in the two best flavours: national and international.

Some day in the future, maybe, a disastrous-drug-trade-related story can be proven to be as completely harmless and stupid as a high-school physics project gone wrong, or some other comic situation. I don't meant to play 'morally-outraged idiot', but in this case I thought maybe there was some point to the dumb act, and I thought, goddamn, if the drug markets were slightly different, Mexico wouldn't have hooked even one investigator or digital repeater from the sensationalistic, tone-deaf, and apparently forgetful global media. Shit, before I forget: if Reagan had jumped on only one ideological grenade, he could have entirely prevented the Cuban Cigarette Boat Crisis in the 1980's.

The worst part is that the United State's economic blind eye is, as ever, responsible. The typical hot-and-cold relationship to drugs does enough damage (allegedly; yes; in some cases) to society on an individual scale, let alone a national one. While ignoring the right of civilian domestic supply with various measures, which are only now beginning to erode, it has created a drug bottleneck which has been exploited in many iterations, and in many ways throughout recent history.

What is most terrifying is to imagine the hypocrisy of ethical consumers in America who smoke marijuana (allegedly a small group of people, which is a rumor I find distasteful) who are apparently funding a small, ongoing war. Hippies, and maybe even a majority of unethical users, have problems with people being shot or decapitated. That is Bad Stuff in any language, but maybe not in the lingo of the much ballyhooed, tech-fueled 'age of indifference'. Even those considered politically conservative can agree that outsourcing profit that could be nationalized is a ridiculous proposition, right? And conservative moralists, do you really wish anyone to be killed, even as a result of inaction, and then ignore the moral or ethical implications? These the traditional enemies of marijuana and other drugs are of course oblivious to any argument about glasses or half-fullness.

Everyone is entitled to indifference. I am of the opinion that being indifferent to pretty much everything is alright, but I may have to change my opinions on things, because I can sense what the losing proposition is. If nobody plays their cards right there's a lot of dissatisfaction at the table, and it is all exactly as Kenny Rogers prophesied.

So there's one boycott of commodities the United States consumes regularly that can take place, potentially end a 'diversion' on its own border, without crippling its economy – perhaps even stimulating it. For my money, the dirtiest economism of all is 'ethical consumption', which is similar in smut-factor to the 'cap and trade'. The only good thing about the economy is that it is still a game that is somewhat open to just about anyone, unless one is blissfully in the gutter with an empty bottle of wine and no cash.

Surely there are even a handful of methadryl spillers in the USA who would put their honor where their high was for a few weeks if only to cripple the encroaching clusterfuck for a few years.


For those who are factotums to fact and nothing but the fact: